[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.It had pointed parapets and took up more than half of an entire block between West End Avenue and Broadway.The doorman was uniformed like a doomed hussar in the retreat from Smolensk, down to his trim waxed mustache.Joe was waiting for her when she walked up, his coat slung over his arm.It was a pretty day, cold and bright, the sky as blue as a Nash and cloudless but for one lost lamb overhead.It had been a long time since Rosa had been in this neighborhood.The walls of high apartment houses stretching far away to the north, which had struck her in the past as self-important and stuffily bourgeois, now had a sturdy, sober look to them.In the austere light of autumn, they looked like buildings filled with serious and thoughtful people working hard to accomplish valuable things.She wondered if perhaps she had had enough of Greenwich Village."What is this all about?" she said, taking Joe's arm."I just signed the lease," he said."Come on up and see.""A lease? You're moving out? You're moving here! Did you and Sammy have a fight?""No, of course not.I never fight with Sammy.I love Sammy.""I know you do," she said."You guys are a good team.""It's first, well, he's moving to Los Angeles.Okay, he says for three months only to write the movie, but I bet you good money after the bad he will stay there when he goes.What's in the package?""A present," she said."I guess you can hang it in your new apartmerit." She was a little put out that he had said nothing to her about a move, but that was the way he was about everything.When they had a date, he would never tell her where they were going or what they were going to do.It was not so much that he refused as that he managed to communicate he would prefer it if she didn't ask."This is nice."There was a marble fountain in the lobby, festooned with glinting Japanese carp, and an echoing interior courtyard of vaguely Moorish flavor.When the elevator door opened, with a deep and musical chime, a woman got out, followed by two small, adorable boys in matching blue woolen suits.Joe tipped his hat."This is for Thomas you're doing this," Rosa said, getting on the elevator."Isn't it?""Ten," Joe said to the elevator man."I just thought this might be a, well, a better neighborhood.You know, for me.for me to.""For you to raise him in."He shook his head, smiling."That sounds very strange.""You are going to be like a father to him, you know," she said.And I could be like a mother.Just ask me, Joe, and I'll do it.It was on the tip of her tongue to say this, but she held back.What would she be saying if she did? That she wanted to marry him? For ten years, at least, since she was twelve or thirteen, Rosa had been declaring roundly to anyone who asked that she had no intention of getting married, ever, and that if she ever did, it would be when she was old and tired of life.When this declaration in its various forms had ceased to shock people sufficiently, she had taken to adding that the man she finally married would be no older than twenty-five.But lately she had been starting to experience strong, inarticulate feelings of longing, of a desire to be with Joe all the time, to inhabit his life and allow him to inhabit hers, to engage with him in some kind of joint enterprise, in a collaboration that would be their lives.She didn't suppose they needed to get married to do that, and she knew that she certainly ought not to want to.But did she? When her father had gone to see Mrs.Roosevelt, he had told the First Lady, explaining his connection to the matter, that one of the children on the ship was the brother of the young man his daughter was going to marry.Rosa had carefully neglected to pass that part of the story on to Joe."I think it's very sweet of you.Sensible and sweet.""There are good schools nearby.I have an interview for him at the Trinity School which I am told is excellent and takes Jews.Deasey said he would help me get him into Collegiate where he attended.""Goodness, you've been making a lot of plans." She really ought to know better than to take offense at his secretiveness.Keeping things to himself was just his nature; she supposed it was what had drawn him to the practice of magic in the first place, with its tricks and secrets that must never be divulged."Well, I have a lot of time.It is eight months I have been waiting for this to happen.I've been doing a lot of thinking."The elevator operator braked the car and hauled the door aside for them.He waited for them to step out.Joe was gazing at her with a strange, fixed look, and she thought, or perhaps she only wished, that she saw a glint of mischief there."Ten," said the operator."A lot of thinking," Joe repeated."Ten, sir," the elevator man said.In the apartment there were views of New Jersey out the windows all along one side, gilded fixtures in the larger of the two bathrooms, and the parquetry of the floors was dizzying and mathematical
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]